In The Halls of Meat and Democracy in Athens and Crete
Both Are Worth Saving
Saturday morning, 7:45 am, Athens Central Market
I am walking through halls of meat. Men in white coats, and a few women, are standing in front of large hunks, sometimes the entire bodies, of formerly live animals. With knives and cleavers they are trimming, chopping and slicing them into smaller, more manageable and more sellable portions.
They seem happy, these butchers. Yesterday was a holiday - National No Day, or Ohi Day. I bet many of them were up late, having a few too many glasses of Mastika and Raki. But they smile as they work, and say hello to each other. They are proud to be at their tasks, their trade, their metier.
I wager you could not find a scene like this anywhere in the United States.
First of all, there are virtually no real city markets left in the United States, those enormous and often beautiful buildings, owned by the city, where purveyors of meat, fish and vegetables sell directly to citizens. The few that remain, including Pike Place in Seattle and the Essex Street Market in New York, don’t actually have animals being cut up on site, at least very few. American cities do have many outdoor Farmers Markets, and that’s a good thing. But meat, if sold, is for the most part cut up first and sometimes even prepackaged. Sometimes it is even frozen.
In Europe, most cities still have a big central city market, sometimes several. There are the famous ones, like La Boqueria off La Rambla in Barcelona, but most midsize or even small cities have them too. I know because I seek them out when I travel.
I'm glad I got up to see this. K and EC, my wife and our four-year-old, are still in bed in the nearby apartment K found for us. I slipped out to come here. I would say it’s one of the highlights of our week-long vacation in Greece, which basically was five days in Crete and two days in Athens. It ranks up there with seeing the 800-year-old Venetian city of Rethymno in Crete, and almost as high as seeing the Parthenon and other denizens of the Acropolis.
This Athens Central Market on Athinas Street is clearly the real thing. It has soaring ceilings with skylights for natural light. The building is shaped like the letter E. The bottom, top and side of the letter are meat, meaning three halls of meat.
The middle part of the letter E is the hall of seafood, sandwiched between the halls of the products of land-walking animals. Men and women in white here also chop and cut, but less so. There is less to do with fish and shellfish. It is mostly being taken out of the large ice-filled styrofoam boxes it comes in, and then taken out and displayed on ice in the stalls.
How does this meat and fish arrive in the Central Market? The large vans that bring the meat and fish are scattered around inside and on the edge of the halls. They will doubtless leave soon. On the meat trucks, the back doors open up to reveal carcasses hanging on hooks. These are somehow taken down to the butchers, who hang them in their shops or start carving them up.
I have been really impressed with the vegetable-based cuisine I’ve been eating in Greece, so it’s surprising just how much meat there is here, and in such variety. Generally different stalls handle different types of meat; pig, cow, duck, lamb, goat and so on. It's more real than in an American supermarket. To name just one example, great chunks of brownish-red liver, slick and glistening under the fluorescent lights, seem to be everywhere.
I have long loved city markets. I have thought of writing a book about some aspect of them for geez, three decades? They combine three great loves of mine: architecture, eating and the economy, structure and design of markets and cities.
I envision a coffee-table book, with text written by me, and pictures of these big structures. Would the book be historical? Contemporary? European? American? One idea I had recently was to write a book called Not A City Market, which would be about all the city market buildings that have been turned into something else. There are many in Prague.
After strolling around for a while, I went and had coffee at Mokka, a coffee place next to the market that dates back to 1923, its sign says. The clerk makes me a Greek coffee (please don't call it Turkish!) in one of those golden pitchers with a handle. He places the pitcher in dark sand behind the counter to brew. This is a traditional way of doing it, I’m told. I don’t understand the process. There must be a heating element under the sand.
It’s approaching 9 am when I return to the market. The butchers are still carving meat, but there are now customers among the white-coats. And the streets around the market are coming alive.
I wonder why I see only halls for meat and fish. I later read that there is a whole other hall or building, which I missed, filled with produce. Maybe it’s a block or two away. It makes sense that a market for produce is not part of the same one that has meat and fish.
As is traditional with city markets, there are a few restaurants inside the market, which cater in part to the workers. I stop into a soup restaurant. The trim, upright man with neat gray hair shows me a line of big cauldrons of soup - beef, goat, tripe, fish and more. I order goat. The man brings over a shallow bowl with a large meat-covered bone sticking out from broth with chunks of potatoes and carrots. I eat. It’s good, but not write-home good. It's way too much for me at this hour. I eat about half.
I wander a bit more and then get back to the apartment, to discover EC and K just getting up.
They haven’t missed me.
What Gods Do We Worship?
Okay, as well as talking about food, I have to squeeze in a few words about the Acropolis, the Agora and all the ruins of ancient Greece you see right in the middle of downtown Athens.
One thing that becomes clear is that there are layers and layers of history here. It didn’t stop 2500 years ago, when Pericles had the Parthenon built. The Romans came, the Germanic tribes, the Venetians, the Orthodox Christians, and the Ottomans. Each tore down, adapted and built over top of the statues and classical columns we recognize so well.
By what right or by what value do we (I’m using the collective “we”), tear down or push aside the religious or civic buildings of these past governments and cultures? Is it cultural tyranny? Prejudice? What do we worship when we clear away all the Ottoman buildings once on top of the Acropolis, and clear away the Greek Orthodox church that was once inside the temple of Hephaestus in the Agora, and instead highlight what we can reclaim or recreate of the ancient Greeks?
After all, we no longer believe in the Greek gods. We don’t believe Athena came out of Zeus’s head or that Hermes flies around with winged sandals that Hephaestus made. Even though that stuff is really cool. And the old Christian stuff and the old Islamic stuff was really old and often really beautiful. Why don’t we preserve and care about those to the same degree that we do the ancient Greek stuff? What are we worshiping when we make our pilgrimage up the steep hill to the top of the Acropolis?
We aren’t worshiping Jesus, or Mohammad or any other single god. We are worshiping a set of processes, and a belief in those processes. We are worshiping learning, light and democracy. I’m no classical scholar, but I think it’s accurate to say the ancient Greeks, for all their bad or human sides, were very good at those things. They practiced democracy, even while holding slaves. They practiced, through all those great mathematicians my wife knows, and all those philosophers, what might be called early versions of the scientific method. And they practiced theater, music and dance, what we call the arts. They are practices that will never be perfected, but always can be made better.
Something to keep in mind as the midterm elections in the United States approach.
When In Greece, Eat Your Vegetables
In the United States, I have not particularly liked or sought out Greek food or restaurants. But I loved it in Crete and Athens, as I suspected I would.
Some of it is the same food, just fresher. That makes a huge difference. The spinach and onion spanakopita I bought from a bakery in Athens had a just-cooked interior inside fresh, crispy pastry. Amazingly good. One giant salad I had was a delight of greens, cheese, figs, raisins and various nuts, in a very light dressing, all very fresh.
But the food here is also more vegetable centric.
In Crete, I had black-eyed peas mixed with parsley, raisins, dried tomatoes, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Amazingly good. You don’t see that in Greek restaurants back home.
I will try to replicate that dish here in Prague. I suspect it is one of those great, simple dishes that will be very hard to recreate, because the god, whatever that god is, is in the details.
An engaging post. THANKS, Alex!
Glad to have a post with such an emphasis on food after the omission of a meal photo in your recent Prague Diary. See you very soon!